Losing Touch.(MySpace)

Byline: Steven Levy

I had some bad news for Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, the founders of MySpace who now run the business for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. They'd lost my son's high school. A year ago, he and nearly all his fellow students were fanatical MySpace cadets. But now, like bees abandoning a hive, they'd left and swarmed to Facebook.

I'd anticipated that sharing this admittedly anecdotal item over lunch with the sharp co-founders of one of the world's most successful Internet sites would lead to an intense grilling as to why this sudden exodus occurred. (My son thinks MySpace has too many ads and the pages are ugly. He also doesn't like the spam from alleged "friends" selling ringtones and other stuff, a problem that MySpace is trying to address.) But DeWolfe and Anderson, who sold to News Corp. last year for $580 million, didn't ask. Instead, they cited statistics that showed that their numbers were strong and opined that the exodus might have been a geographical anomaly. Anyway, Anderson said, even if some teens did jump to Facebook for online socializing, they would still keep coming to MySpace because of all the media it offers.

It was an interesting window into where their hearts are. To the founders, allowing kids to claim their own niche of the Net with a MySpace page and lots of online friends was a strategic ...